Pepper Lecture: Artist Isabel Beavers and Nora N. Khan in Conversation

Isabel Beavers is based in Los Angeles and works at the intersections of new media, ecology, and collective action. Beavers is the artistic director of Supercollider LA and an Annenberg Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. They were the 2024–26 Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at Harvey Mudd College. Exhibited widely throughout the United States and globally, their work addresses the climate crisis through myth, spirituality, and more-than-human perspectives. Beavers fosters communities of care and experimentation through artistic practice, teaching, and curating, inviting audiences to sense the unseen and imagine futures of resilience.

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator. Her writing on philosophy of AI and emerging technologies is referenced widely across fields. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public civic exhibitions, titled Coyote Time.  She was co-curator with Andrea Bellini of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, hosted by Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed (2020), she worked with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions in an exhibition that featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms.

She is currently faculty in creative technologies at UCSC and has served as Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts, History and Theory faculty at SCI-Arc and professor in Digital + Media at Rhode Island School of Design, where she was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her books are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2026), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019), and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick.

This program is made possible by the Murray Pepper and Vicki Reynolds Pepper Distinguished Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Endowed Fund at Pitzer College.

Light refreshments will be served.

Image credits: Photo courtesy of Isabel Beavers; photo by Alexa Viscius, courtesy of Nora N. Khan